DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. Back in 1922, Houston had a problem. People were pouring into the city faster than walls could go up to house them, and somebody had to do something about it.
That somebody was Robert C. Duff — a man who'd already made his name in two of Texas's most serious industries: railroads and banking. Duff wasn't the kind of fellow to see a shortage and look the other way.
He built a three-story apartment building, owned it himself, and put a roof over the heads of folks who needed one. And not just any roof — a tile roof, with bracketed eaves running the length of the building like the arms of something that intends to stay put. The Sheridan Apartments, they called it.
Now, the styling on this building is something worth pausing over. It draws from the arts and crafts period and the prairie school of architecture — two movements that believed a building ought to feel like it grew out of the earth rather than just got dropped on top of it. There's a deliberateness to the design, a kind of quiet confidence in every bracket and roofline.
The Great Depression came along eventually and rearranged the lives of Texas railroad men and bankers, Duff among them. But the building he raised kept standin'. And here's the thing that'll get you — of all the apartment buildings Houston put up in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the kind they used to call flats, almost every last one of them is gone now.
Torn down, replaced, swallowed by a city that rarely stops movin' long enough to look back. The Sheridan is one of the precious few that made it through. Three stories of tile and timber and history, still standing in Harris County, still telling anyone who bothers to look what Houston was reaching for back in 1922.
What the marker says
This three-story apartment building was constructed in 1922 to help ease a housing shortage in Houston. It was built and owned by Robert C. Duff, a prominent Texas railroad man and banker before the Great Depression. The building features bracketed eaves and a tile roof and exhibits influences of the arts and crafts and prairie school periods in architectural styling. The Sheridan is one of Houston's few remaining "flats" from the 1920s and 1930s. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1984